Journal of International Financial Markets Institutions & Money最新文献

This study examines the interconnectedness between central bank digital currencies (CBDC) index, digital assets and financial stability. First, we use the CBDC index as a measure of financial stability and examine its connectedness with other known measures of financial stability used in the literature. Secondly, we analyse the connectedness of CBDC index with digital assets such as cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens and various measures of financial stability. By analysing index returns of CBDC data and applying various connectedness measures to CBDC index, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and NFTs, we gain insights into the relationships among these assets within a framework. The findings reveal a significant level of connectedness between CBDCs index, digital assets and financial stability. Our analysis shows a weak positive connectedness between CBDCs index and digital assets, indicating that movements in the CBDC index are not closely related to the performance of various digital assets and have a very small contribution to the changes in the returns of digital assets. Furthermore, the study finds bidirectional connectedness between CBDCs and other financial stability measures, suggesting that changes in CBDC performance can influence the overall stability of the financial system, and vice versa. This highlights the importance of carefully considering the design and implementation of CBDCs to ensure they support financial stability objectives.

This paper investigates the role of aggregate disagreement in the relationship between environmental, social, and governance ($\mathrm{ESG}$) scores and future stock returns in the United States (US), European Union (EU), and United Kingdom (UK). We find that firms with high $\mathrm{ESG}$ scores are likely to have higher exposure to aggregate disagreement than firms with low $\mathrm{ESG}$ scores because of the divergence of opinions about long-term earnings growth. Consistent with our conjecture, the results suggest that when aggregate disagreement is high, a profitable trading strategy is to long firms with low $\mathrm{ESG}$ scores and to short those with higher $\mathrm{ESG}$ scores. Our results have clear implications for the growing debate over $\mathrm{ESG}$ investment strategies.

Momentum is a well-known and studied artefact of financial markets. In this paper, we investigate whether momentum in a country’s macroeconomic variables is related to the future performance of equities in that country. We find that the past economic trends of a country’s fundamentals are positively associated with the equity market index returns. Based on that, an economic momentum portfolio of buying (selling) equity index in countries with relatively strong (weak) economic past trends exhibits an annualised Sharpe ratio of 0.87. The economic momentum portfolio outperforms benchmarks regarding rewards to variability and maximum drawdown and yields an annualised alpha of 3.72%, leaving 95% of the returns unexplained by the benchmarks.

We use the conditional network connectedness approach of Stenfors et al. (2022) along with its frequency-domain, and tail and dynamic extensions to explore complex linkages among the carbon market, climate policy uncertainty, economic stability, and financial market stability. We focus on whether the carbon market and climate policy uncertainty impact US economic and financial market stability, and how these impacts occur. We identify a dynamic impact of the carbon market on economic and financial market stability, with these impacts varying in different frequency-domains and different quantile levels. Energy consumption and production structures as well as carbon emissions are found to be important mediators for carbon market to affect economic stability, while renewable energy equity is found to be a mediator through which the carbon market affects financial market stability. Further, while the impact of climate policy uncertainty on economic and financial market stability is typically weak, it strengthens under some circumstances, particularly in the long-term frequency-domain, right-tailed, prior to 2020. In these cases, carbon market, energy production structure and financial market stability are found to be weak mediators for climate policy uncertainty to impact economic stability.

We study the predictive value of climate risks for subsequent financial stress in a sample of daily data running from October 2006 to December 2022 of thirteen countries, which include China, ten European Union (EU) countries, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US). The climate risk indicators are the result of a text-based approach which combines the term frequency-inverse document frequency and the cosine-similarity techniques. Given the persistence of financial stress as well as the importance of spillover effects of financial stress from other countries, we use random forests, a machine-learning technique tailored to handle many predictors, to estimate our forecasting models. Our findings show that climate risks tend to have a moderate impact, albeit in several cases statistically significant, on predictive accuracy, which tends to be stronger, in our cross-section of countries, on a daily than at a weekly or monthly forecast horizon of financial stress. Furthermore, the predictive value of climate risks for financial stress is heterogeneous across the countries in our sample, implying that a univariate forecasting model appears to be better suited than a corresponding multivariate one. Finally, the predictive value of climate risks for financial stress appears to be stronger in several countries at the lower conditional quantiles of financial stress.

Consistent with the existing evidence from single-country studies, our difference-in-differences estimation finds a negative effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) provisions on labor productivity in a sample of member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Our study is distinct, however, in that we provide empirical evidence on why EPL reduces labor productivity, which has different practical implications. The negative effect is more pronounced among firms domiciled in countries with weaker investor protection, less developed takeover markets, and weaker employee incentives to work hard, those in industries with less intense competition, those that suffer from more severe agency problems, and those that have lower pay-for-performance sensitivity. These results suggest that the firm-employee agency conflict is the channel through which employment protection legislation reduces labor productivity.

Using longitudinal data from 2013-2018 and a sample of 9,622 observations from 30 countries, we find that the relationship between family involvement and environmental preparedness is mediated by financial constraints, such that family firms are more likely to be environmentally prepared due to facing lower financial constraints. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the negative relationship between family involvement and financial constraint is strengthened by the quality of public governance while the negative relationship between financial constraint and environmental preparedness is weakened by the quality of the national environmental infrastructure. Our results hold for various robustness tests.

This study examines the relationship between proxy advisory firms’ recommendations and investors’ voting behavior in Japan, where corporate governance has been under transition. Based on 1,025 shareholder meeting proposals and recommendations by proxy advisory firms in Japan between March 2010 and March 2022, multivariate regression analyses reveal that the dissenting recommendations of the two main proxy advisory firms are negatively correlated with the approval rate of proposals, as well as the percentage of affirmative votes cast by institutional investors. Furthermore, the institutional investors’ behavior is more consistent with the recommendations of proxy advisory firms than that of other investors.

This paper examines the effect of FinTech lending on the market power and stability of incumbent banks. Using an international sample of 6,225 banks during the period 2013–2019, our results show that the volume of credit provided by FinTech lenders negatively affects bank market power and stability. These results are influenced by the legal framework and institutional quality of each jurisdiction. Furthermore, the impact of FinTech lending on bank stability is partially channeled by the effect of FinTech credit on the market power of incumbent banks. Our main results – lower bank market power and bank stability – are also observed at the country level and after addressing potential endogeneity concerns. Regarding policy implications, more prudential regulation on FinTech activity is needed to address information imbalance issues and potential risks stemming from their activities. Furthermore, reinforcing the legal framework and institutional structure could serve to mitigate the adverse effects of FinTech lending on the traditional commercial banking sector.

Employing a panel sample of 29,316 firms across 34 countries spanning 2006 to 2019, we investigate the impact of climate risk on firm-level investment efficiency. We find that climate risk significantly increases investment inefficiency, namely, the investment deviation from the expected optimal level. Cross-sectional analyses show that the increasing impact of climate risk on investment inefficiency can be mitigated by stronger country-level uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation culture, while at the firm level, corporate operational risk and industry competition can magnify the impact of climate risk on investment inefficiency. Our results remain valid after considering various robustness tests and endogeneity concerns.